“Work from home and transcribe medical documents”
“Natural formula for enhancing effect”
“Dear chen.gee@gmail.com 79% 0FF on Pfizer !”
“Get Stuff In Your INBOX! - Get fr--bies, coupons and samples”
“
If you have ever wondered why junk emails mostly land up in your inbox on a Monday or Friday evening, you are probably right if you conclude that the email senders know that we tend to have bad Mondays mornings and will spend the time to “check” through all our emails. This was one of the more interesting things I learned in addition to debating over the use of exclamation marks in the subject line, starting sentences with a catchy verb to capture the readers attention during my one year at a Internet startup called InternetSeer (www.internetseer.com).
InternetSeer’s office My desk
It is free as long as you give us your email
A lot of services that you use on the Internet are free because the companies providing the services have found a way to get someone else to pay for you. In the case of InternetSeer(IS), the basic service (website monitoring) is free as long as you allow IS to send you a weekly newsletter containing products and write-ups from advertisers. IS will earn a placement fee from the advertisers and commission generated from any sales traceable to the newsletter InternetSeer sends out.
The economics of email
It was by all aspects a great business model. IS’s service was popular and it was a never ending source of new email addresses for the email database. Most of the people signing up for the service were also small business owners. This means that IS’s database was a goldmine for advertisers selling office supplies, equipment and other related products and services.
In 2004, it costs InternetSeer USD$7500 to send out 1 million emails or 0.75 cents per person. Most products will earn IS a commission of USD$5 so this means that to breakeven IS will need to sell about 1500 products. If we assume 1500 products were sold in 1500 separate emails, this means that IS will need just a conversion rate of 0.15% (1500 emails divided by 1 million emails sent) to breakeven for every 1 million email sent. The value proposition is even more compelling when placement fees were factored into the equation. So it was no wonder that the company did well.
The day they shut off the Internet
All was well until one fine autumn morning in 2004 when I found the internet connection down at my terminal. It was not just me, the entire office was cut off from its money generating lifeline. Phones were going off non-stop at tech support as irate customers demand to know why they are not getting their web monitoring reports as usual. The weekly newsletter was due to be out in the evening and we are now where near from been able to send out an email let alone one million emails. The CTO(Chief Technology Officer) made a call to our Internet Service Provider(ISP) and we were told that they had decided to shut us down as they were receiving too many automated complains that we were sending email spam. Email spam refers to unsolicited commercial e-mail or junk email. Fortunately there was a plan B, the CTO diverted all our traffic to another ISP(albeit with less capacity) until the original ISP open up to us again.
The cyber arms race and a sucker is born every minute
By 2004, there was already an arms race between junk email senders and companies providing technology to block spam. IS was unfortunately caught in the crossfire when a batch of its emails were wrongly flagged as junk by a filtering software and automated emails were sent to IS’s ISP to complain about the spam. The software used to filter junk email has advanced since then and a lot of the features that you see in email software today are a result of the evolution in the fight to stop junk email from flooding your inbox. For example, email software usually do not display email graphics by default these days as email senders track the opening of an email by monitoring the request for a graphics download to the email. Once a graphics request is detected from an email address, the email senders will know that the email address is active and the account will be a prime target for more ads.
Unfortunately, the most advance email filters is no match for human greed and at times plain naiveté. This are the two traits that junk email senders prey on when they send out emails selling cheap medicine, get rich quick schemes and Nigerian scams.
For InternetSeer, the misunderstanding was resolved eventually and it became the intern’s job to test the newsletters against the leading anti-junk email solutions.
